I’ve been using Ulysses on and off for about five years now. Currently I’m on (as of Friday). When I like it, as I currently do, I like that I can easily type comments into first drafts — notes to my future self on points I want to come back to. That’s essential to my workflow.
I can embed images for inclusion in articles, but the images are out of the way, because I don’t need to see them when I’m writing.
It’s a nice-looking app, easy on the eyes.
The formatting and other commands are simple and I have all those years of muscle memory accessing them.
Also, the app itself is simple and uncluttered. That’s a bit of an odd thing to say, because I think the app is also starting to suffer from feature bloat. The developers are starting to add features that I don’t care about. I don’t use keywords so I don’t care about upgrades to keywords. I don’t use tabs; I just open one document per window. And so on.
However, the features I don’t use are easy to completely hide, and they don’t drag on performance, so they don’t matter to me.
Yes, I incoporate reminders into my worksheets with comment or comment block commands. I made a reminder based on a Michael Hyatt template.The template does not have to be deleted when publishing to the web. But, I usually do. Or i use the notes, keywords, statistics section/column for reminders. (Forgot what to call this in Ulysses speak.)
This is the fundamental reason that we ultimately can’t escape Word. And I don’t say that to hate on Word. I’ve had a “mostly love but sometimes annoyed” relationship with it since I started using it in 1992.
The interesting dynamic is that for a long time there was really one tool if you wanted to write: Word. Anything written went in it. (Excluding, of course plain text writing, like READMEs, source code, configuration files, and the like). You could use PowerPoint or QuarkXpress for certain things. But anything you wanted to write really only went in Word.
Now we have a better landscape where there is a proliferation of writing tools that serve different purposes. Many of these tools are better than Word for the applicable domain they were designed for.
It gives us a lot of options but increases the thinking time involved in deciding what option is best for a given project. And then, at the end of the day, some environments only know Word. So the great tool that you want to use ultimately has to output something to Word so you can collaborate on it with your colleagues or teammates.
For example, I really like using OmniOutliner to make outlines for my cases, but the rest of my team can’t use it. So either I do all the work myself or it has to live in a .docx file.
One of the great joys of being self employed: I only have to use the software I want to, I am my own IT software person and my husband is the IT hardware person. I use Scrivener for almost all writing now and if required to share with someone else who does not have a Mac I export out to LibreOffice.
In fact I’m converting many of my regularly updated documents that exist in LibreOffice now back into Scrivener.
Now if DEVONThink got a LibreOffice Reader or if there was an iOS version of LO I’d be more inclined to leave them there. But With Scrivener I can see and read and edit all my documents on any device if I choose to.
I like Scrivener with two caveats - that the iOS version is streamlined and missing some features on the Mac, L&L is not aiming for full cross-platform compatibility, and the complexity of the app means that if I go away from it for a while I forget some ways to do things. (And some people are having sync issues.) Those reasons underscore why I currently resort to Ulysses, even though I own Scrivener.
The politics of software adoption is maddening, especially in a law firm. Our firm switched over to thin clients recently. We operate on locked-down virtual desktops. I can’t even install vIM, my preferred text editor. IT can’t or does not want to support a proliferation of apps. I got accused once (complimented?) of being “ghost IT.”
I started using Scrivener at the end of last year, and have wondered how I ever lived without it. Were I to work alone, I could see myself keeping everything in Scrivener and exporting documents out to PDF for archive purposes.
[Slight topic digression ensues…] As I was transitioning away from Windows—but before I switched over to the Mac—I went 100% Linux. I liked using LibreOffice, which I did for several years. I think the interface is dated but I really prefer to use open source software when the option is available and the tool is capable. I just found that unless I was working solitary or interfacing only with highly technical people, it was more difficult to use LibreOffice. I switched away from Linux because I just found some of the tools I needed to use were non-existent or woefully poorly designed in Linux. This is not the fault of Linux but the economics of software development. Still, the difference between macOs and Linux desktop environments is stark. Working in macOS (the Mercedes Benz S550 of operating systems) is orders of magnitudes better than working in Gnome or other Linux desktops (the Jeep Wrangler of desktop environments). [Both are still more efficient than Windows, IMHO. There is no convincing me that macOS is NOT the most polished operating environment to date.] I still use Linux in a virtual machine and I’m going to do a Linux From Scratch build as a project to teach each of my kids about operating systems and software development. And I always keep my LibreOffice software up-to-date.
Your case of exporting out of Scrivener to PDF for archive purposes is exactly what I am doing with a lot of the articles and stuff I’ve written that people are asking for me to provide again, or to do a similar one again.
My husband uses Linux exclusively. A lot of the old mac hardware that I am done with gets re-purposed by him as a straight Linux machine. He’s got several old nearly dead mac laptops we got from friends. One of them he has a thumb drive with a Linux system on it and that is what he uses as a take to the pub and work on. If it gets beer spilled on it no big loss.
My latest clean the archives task is that I have an old PowerBook 180 that still runs and has some stuff on it from my mother, who passed away over 20 years ago. I need to check it, pull anything interesting or useful off, wipe it and then see if hubby needs another old mac laptop for something.
If you’re interested in Ulysses, The Sweet Setup has an excellent course on the app. I’ve just played around with it, but I plan to do more writing in Ulysses in the coming months to evaluate how well it will meet my needs.
I use iThoughts to create a mindmap/outline and export it as a Markdown document to Ulysses. Then I edit the first draft in Ulysses. Ulysses is my main writing environment. Then I export the Ulysses sheet to Word for final review. This is pretty much the only time I use Word. When I finish the final touches, I can email the Word document to others.
I do wish for tables in Ulysses. But I do the tables in Word as a workaround.
Word is our corporate thing. But I told IT to set up a LaTeX environment on my laptop, so I am not stuck with it when I need to write something longer/more complicated/with citations.
Smaller things just get done in Word, because it’s there. And switching to another software doesn’t really offer any benefits when I just need to type some paragraphs
I use my own MBP at work and write the nasty stuff on it, final composing is mostly done in TexPad
And whoever said Word was the only one for a long time: WordPerfect was also there.
I kept WP 5.1 installed in DosBox on my Macs for years. Some wonderful features (e.g. parallel columns) still aren’t handled by the Nisus importer for wp documents.
WordPerfect was the only writing app that many law offices would use. For a long time, I required Word for everyone in my company, except for Legal – where only WordPerfect was allowed by in-house and outside counsel.
And before that – in the early MS-DOS days – there was WordStar, which was quite good for the time – fast and feature rich. WordStar was a breakaway introduction to electronic “word processing” (a strange phrase rarely used anymore). With DOS-based writing apps, came the gradual demise from the dedicated Wang word processors that were very expensive.
That brings back memories of my college days. You’d stop at the front desk of the computer lab, check out WordPerfect on a 5-1/4" floppy, then load it into the computer’s memory before you could actually use it.
I’d say that makes me feel old, but I think it’s really more indicative of just how quickly technology has changed. I’m pretty sure I was born the same year as @MacSparky.
In the early 90s I worked at one of the top litigation firms in NYC and it was one of the last holdouts whose ‘Typing Room’ used WordPerfect, which was once the industry standard. By '92 though most major law firms had migrated to MS Word, which had first been released for Windows in 1989. In 1991 the release of WinWord 2.0 really established that app’s dominance, at least in the legal arena.
Probably depended somewhat on the area of practice and industry. In air transport (my field) WordPerfect was pervasive until the early 2000s. Which might have had to do with the slow pace of DOT and FAA’s adoption, due to the volume of regulatory correspondence and filings.
I think I was the one who wrote the statement you are taking umbrage with. And you are correct; my statement was careless in that I was trying abstract away some history that was not relevant to my point but went overboard. I started out in high school on WordPerfect 5.1. I vastly preferred writing in WordPerfect. I lived in reveal codes. I used it in law school once the Corel suite for Windows came out. By my second year practicing law, most law firms had migrated over to Word and I followed suit. What I should have written to avoid the snub to WP is this:
In my very specific context, Word and WordPerfect are essentially like Coke and Pepsi. I’d offer vim and emacs, as a more consistent thematic allusion to perfect substitutes, but surely that could start a war.
